NatureZen: The Bold and the Buteo, Episode 2
words and photos by Melissa McMasters
Previously on The Bold and the Buteo…
Red-shouldered hawks from rival families competed for the right to set up shop in the most desirable part of town: the Old Forest. There was screaming and throwing of talons for weeks. Previous hero Pops looked to have been displaced by a younger model, and Ralph and Mariah found love on the golf cart path.
Three months have elapsed, and a lot of sand has passed through the hourglass. Let’s catch up!
After Ralph and Mariah paired off, I expected things to get a little quieter. But there were still midday showdowns in the vicinity of the Green Trail during the first week of March. Running towards the screeching one afternoon, I stumbled upon the construction of a mansion: Bertha was building her nest in a tulip poplar!
The fact that she was mostly gathering grassy and leafy material suggested that construction was close to being finished. The place didn’t look like much from ground level, but I trust that inside it sported the finest interior design rodents can buy.
All week Bertha worked at augmenting the nest while her young mate mostly hopped from tree to tree yelling about something. It’s a soap story as old as Procter & Gamble: our heroine toils away at the business of the home while her fellow is out carousing.
A few days later, Fields and I were walking the trail when there was suddenly a lot of activity around the nest. Both birds were in motion, and when our second-year bird paused, it had a snake snack! Bertha headed back to the nest, while Fields and I were left scratching our heads. This seemed like a situation in which a male had brought food to a female, but we hadn’t actually seen an exchange. We were still under the impression that our adult-plumaged nest-builder was a female bird. “But there’s no way one female would tolerate another female this close to her nest,” Fields said. “Unless maybe it’s her daughter and she doesn’t see her as a threat.”
Any soap viewer worth their salt knows that a mother not viewing her daughter as competition is insane: how many third husbands have been stolen by a daughter from a previous marriage? Was it possible I’d gotten this all wrong, and Bertha wasn’t Bertha at all?
Within a week, I had my answer: several days in a row, the younger bird was around the nest, making a racket, and the older bird flew in with food: one day, a rodent, the next day, a worm snake. PLOT TWIST: Turns out our adult-plumaged bird was a male who took on the responsibility not just of feeding his mate, but of building the nest and doing occasional incubating of eggs as well. What a heartthrob!
And this is how our male hawk overcame my unreliable narration and transformed from Bertha into Bert. (I like to think this means that the original Bertha and Pops flew off into the sunset to enjoy their golden years together.) I christened our first-time mama bird June, a nod to both her potential status as Bertha Junior and to the month her babies would likely fledge.
Now let’s return to the breakout stars of Episode 1: Ralph and Mariah. Around the time Bertha became Bert, Malle reported that her Birding Basics class had seen Ralph and Mariah in the throes of passion in the same place on the golf cart path that Kim and I had seen them a few weeks earlier. She also found their nest: a boat of sticks in an old oak tree with a big limb that branched in several directions. This was a much better-hidden nest than Bert and June’s, especially as the trees started to leaf out. I felt lucky to catch a glimpse of tail feathers every few weeks.
As April progressed, I had to change the channel and watch my other favorite soap, “As the Warbler Turns,” but I flipped back constantly to monitor the progress of our hawks. I checked Bert and June’s nest at least four times a week, and one day I started getting worried: the outside was covered in downy white feathers. Had their chicks hatched, only to be taken by a predator?
I looked to Fields for reassurance, but she said that was indeed the likeliest explanation. “You don’t think Ralph or Mariah would have come over and taken a chick from the other nest, do you?” I asked. This would be tough for me to handle, as a person with an almost comical level of attachment to these hawks. She assured me that this was unlikely, as red-shouldered hawks are sit-and-watch predators who perch up high and then pounce on prey on the ground. (Indeed, I’d watched Bert do this many times at this point.) She said the most likely culprit was a Cooper’s hawk, and shortly thereafter we started seeing one lurking around the East Parkway Pavilion. One morning’s Songbird Stroll began with a Coop ostentatiously carrying sticks from the pavilion roof up to its fancy nest, which was wrapped with leaves at the base as though this bird had been an A+ student of basket-weaving. This was as naked a bid for a spin-off as I had ever seen.
I worried that Bert and June’s nest had failed, but on days with a breeze substantial enough to move the tulip poplar leaves, I could sometimes make out June tucked away in her throne of sticks. Fields told me that a bird would almost certainly not remain on a nest with no chicks or eggs, so I kept watch. Bert was still around, too, making food deliveries. I hoped they had become hyper-vigilant and could salvage at least one chick from the (alleged) nest-robbing Coop.
In late April, Fields and I were finishing up our City Nature Challenge run through the park when we stopped on the trail near Ralph and Mariah’s nest. I looked back at it from a different angle, realizing that I’d had a clean sightline to it this whole time and never noticed. From this vantage, we saw Mariah moving around in the nest, clearly tearing up food for a chick. It was only a week later that I caught my first glimpse of baby hawk tail. Mariah was a mom!
Over the next few days, I continued to drop by the nest, hoping the baby would point its head in my direction. I noticed that on consecutive days, the chick facing me appeared to be getting younger–a thing that happens to adults on soap operas all the time, but never to young characters. Yes, it seemed Mariah had two babies, one still with downy head feathers and the other already getting darker.
I felt as invested in these little murderballs as if they were my own.
As the kids got bigger and took up more space in the nest, I started seeing Ralph and Mariah out and about in their corner of the forest more often. Ralph looked like a man haunted by his choices, and Mariah looked positively bedraggled. Our girl needs a spa day, stat.
Exactly two weeks after Mariah’s kids poked their heads up out of the nest, I got what I’d been hoping for: a first look at June’s nestling. She’d done it after all! I’ll be honest, I was worried. Ralph and Mariah seemed like pros–no fuss around their nest site once they’d settled down–while June had spent a lot of time going back and forth from the nest with what appeared to be tragic consequences. But during April, she’d hunkered down. Red-shouldered hawks lay anywhere from two to five eggs, so I told myself there was a good chance they’d have a survivor. Or maybe…
…how about two?
My heart is basically bursting. How on earth am I going to keep track of four adults and four babies this summer? What are we going to call them all? The only thing I’m sure of is that we’re going to need to change the name of this show to “All My Hawk Children.”
This Monday I took a walk in the park and passed by Mariah’s nest, figuring that at about a month old, the chicks would be ready to fledge any day now. It looked awfully crowded in there, and our eldest was starting to look quite grown up.
That’s why it was no surprise that when I popped in between rain showers yesterday afternoon, I noticed the screech of a young hawk coming from the general direction of the nest, but not from the nest itself. After a little bit of searching, I found it: our first fully-fledged little hawk of the summer.
Welcome to the world, my friend. You’ve already mastered the intense stare that means it’s time for us to go to commercial.
